Saturday morning broke quiet and sweet. Eden was coming – Pam’s “Champion Rotarian” – and big things were afoot. The dogs and roosters let us all sleep in except for one lone rooster, "Colonel Coxcombe", I called him, who tried single-handedly to rally the troops. “What are you, men or chickens? Stand up and greet the dawn with your chest out!” The rest were all subdued, reflecting, no doubt, on the fate of the pig yesterday afternoon. Mind you, some of these chickens sound a bit like a loud rusty gate; I’ve been considering asking Pam to include a bottle of chicken gargle-oil with her next shipment to the school.
"The Rotarian is coming!" The burnt out light bulb in the upstairs bathroom was finally replaced late last night, and a fresh propane bottle was hooked up to the on-demand water heater, with full pressure. This morning’s shower was so scalding hot I had to add some cold, which to my mind was preferable to turning the hot tap more and using more water than I need for a shower, as I'd had to do on previous days. Water is a scarce resource here, which is a central focus of Eden's visit.
It was so quiet, I thought the old great-grandmother had been relocated, but she was still there in her bed. We say hello to her as we pass her open door; she waves, and her black eyes glitter, but she doesn’t make a peep.
The college teachers are here for the weekend. Students from 15 to 24 study with them on Saturdays and Sundays. I assume students of this age have jobs through the week. We took some class photos for Pam. The teachers immediately pressed us into service delivering our now well-developed Meet and Greet Skit to the older classes; so much for Deb’s expectations of a day off. One class was missing…according to Paulino, they were away for the day selling beer as a fundraiser for some sort of “reunion”. That might have been the huge load of beer I saw arriving on top of Paulino’s brother’s coach just before dark last night. Yes, there are some distinct cultural differences.
Mid-morning, I spotted Paulino, Marcelo and Bolivar (the director and two of the elementary teachers) finally clearing the childrens’ wash sink in advance of Eden’s arrival, so I stepped out of class to help. They had to break the PVC pipe below the sink. It should have a trap and section that can be unscrewed and removed so it never has to be broken again. The problem wasn’t just sand, although there was a lot of that; as I suspected, it was also compacted food scraps (I’m sure I saw kernels of corn flowing down the hill when the blockage finally cleared) and wrappers from the cookies that are handed out each morning. Paulino and I discussed the potential for bacteria, disease which could spread from child to child and even to the teachers and parents; it’s not like he wasn’t aware of why the sink shouldn’t have been full of standing water all week. The drains need removable strainers, stainless ones with stainless screws so they can be removed easily by a teacher in the future, but not by the students, either on purpose or by accident. They also have no plumbers snake and no toilet plunger on site, both of which would be useful tools in a situation like this (not to mention if they ever experience a blocked toilet!) However, by the time Eden walked past the sink on Sunday morning, it was clean and had a newly repaired drainage pipe as well.
Afterward, Paulino began a set of repairs to the hostel, including a small cupboard in our room, which was, however, missing a hinge that he doesn’t have. At lunch time we found a whole family work bee going on in the dorm area, sorting and folding an immense pile of laundry and bedding for the hostel room across the hall, the floor of which had also been sluiced down and swept out. There must have been many other last minute chores, cleaning and improvements, including, it looks like, a brand new mattress; "the Rotarian is coming…"
We were delighted, during our third and final presentation this morning, to have our first teacher to take advantage of our presence and attend our class along with his students. George (Jorge) told us he is genuinely trying to learn English himself. We congratulated him on his initiative, in front of his students. It will certainly rub off on his students, both in terms of skills and of positive attitude toward learning a new language – that’s positive modelling. We were mindful to begin his class by framing their purpose and the possible future benefits to learning English, which seemed to set the tone perfectly.
Later in the afternoon we met Eden from Colorado, and Jean who is a British born and raised long-time resident of Ecuador, and who until last Saturday owned the Llullu Llama Hostel in Isinlivi, which one can google. She is a friend of Pam’s and will translate for Eden tomorrow as he absorbs everything he can about the needs of farmers in the area for an irrigation system. Deb and I will ride along, and Deb will record interviews with the farmers while Jean is busy translating back and forth. We are looking forward to that.
A sharp disappointment for me that actually made me regret our decision to stay over for the weekend was that the internet went down from noon on Saturday. I had promised my family, who were gathering for a multiple birthday celebration (my mom’s 80th, my youngest brother’s 50th, and my Inuit niece’s 4th), that I would Skype with them. Eden and I worked in the computer lab on a number of equipment related questions, and we tried to get the company responsible to locate the problem and restore service, but it didn’t happen despite a couple of dozen phone calls. In fact, by Sunday night it was still down.
Eden was not impressed: he’s an electrical engineer who owns and runs an ISP at 9000 plus feet in Colorado, and he is able to pinpoint outages on the computer monitor in his home, and have service to his customers swiftly restored. On a previous visit he spent a lot of time going up and down mountains until he found the perfect spot for a radio transmitter for line-of-site internet signal that would reach every village in the area, and proposed a solar powered transmitter tower that could be set up for $8,000, (no maintenance, always-on even if the electric system fails) but before Rotary could take it on as a project the Ecuadorian gov’t said they’d provide internet service to all the remote parts of the country. However, what they really meant was that they’d contract it out to a private company which didn’t provide coverage to all the villages Eden knew that he could have, and they continue to have outages that they can’t locate and fix.
Sunday. It rained overnight for the first time since we got here, but Sunday morning was clear. We waited…and waited until late morning with Eden and Jean. Paulino had gone to a meeting in Sigchos until 10 p.m., then partied until 4 a.m., so he slept really late. While we waited, Jean made her series of phone calls to the ISP, Eden and I worked in the computer lab figuring out that the existing laser printer works but came with only a starter cartridge which was now empty, and had no paper; it wasn’t hooked up to any of the computers, and couldn’t even scan and copy any more. It’s programmed in Spanish, so maybe it was a government installation, like the six new computers. However, by removing and shaking the dry toner cartridge, I got it to print out a few test sheets for us, both scan and copy, and print some text from my laptop.
Jean got frustrated with the number of times we shooed the chickens, dogs and cat out of the hostel because none of the family members or visitors could remember to close the door behind them, so she got a hammer, two nails, a plastic bottle of water and a piece of string, and made what she calls a “dictator”, which automatically closes the door, just with the weight of the water bottle. I was blown away with the simplicity of the device. It worked perfectly.
Once out of bed, Paulino had deliveries to make to all the kindergartens in the area, and in between we tried to pin him down as to the meetings he was supposed to have set up for Eden, which he hadn’t arranged. There was an important meeting in an neighbouring town, a wedding in a second town and a fiesta in a third this weekend, so it was hard to find any of the farmers and community leaders, even the women, that Eden was supposed to be here to meet and interview for the Rotary irrigation grant and other projects they were hoping to initiate or advance. So much for thinking ahead...
I was astounded that Paulino and the local farmers and community leaders would risk losing out on major improvements that had been proposed by not making themselves available for a meeting, after Eden had paid his own airfare and come so far to investigate and report back to Rotary. I came to understand that there was simply no way one could command the tide of local custom to ebb – these people were going to attend their weddings and fiestas, and that was a first priority for a weekend, regardless of Eden’s schedule.
We finally managed to pin down a handful of farmers at a village down in the valley called Tunguiche, and were able to produce a report for Pam and the Engineers Without Borders, with Jean translating, Deb recording as secretary and me listening carefully and then typing up the report from her notes afterward.
On the way back we photographed one of the ill-conceived tanks first installed by the EWB for water capture and distribution. They are like giant blue plastic drinking cups, tapered down to a narrow base. The more water they receive, the more unstable they become. One fell over and almost killed a lady who was trying to attach a pipe or open a valve, and now most villagers are afraid to approach them or use them. They are 500 gallons in size.
The farmers wish to have concrete tanks of 1000 gallon capacity built in situ to replace them, and they will use the 500 gallon plastic ones closer to their homes as pressure break tanks (these are used to avoid pressure from a long fall of water building up to the point where it can break pipes) and further distribution points. It will also triple the capacity of each capture system from 500 gallons to a total of 1500 gallons, and might allow irrigation over more than the twenty percent coverage of arable land that current users are achieving to grow crops. The plastic 500 gallon tanks can be placed lower down, in an area where a hole can be dug to place them into (or at the very least, a frame with much better bracing triangulating outward instead of inward toward the base) to avoid the possibility of future accidents.
Later we went for a drive. Paulino’s deliveries to one side of the valley had been frustrated by three big piles of gravel and sand dumped at the end of a bridge and a trench across the road further up where a road crew was installing pipe. He made it past the sand piles, but turned back at the trench. Eden and Deb and I got to the bridge and Eden thought we’d go as far as the trench. I encouraged him - unfortunately, as it turned out. Paulino had made it around the sharp corner in his longer truck, so ours should do it, right? Wrong. Our little truck had no weight in the back end, not much tread on the tires, one axle instead of two, and not enough power. Deb told us not to go through, but my unfortunately infamous rallying cry was “Aventura!” (Adventure!)
Not only did we not get by the piles, but in trying to back up we got bogged down in the sand, which was like quicksand for the little truck. In rocking it to try to break free, we ended up sliding continuously sideways until finally we were jammed against a concrete post on the bridge and couldn’t go forward or back. We had an anxious hour wondering if we’d be there all night – we had no phone service, and everyone in the region was gone to the festival at the village of El Salado. We found a boy and asked him to go up the hill and find Jean at the hostel to get help. He said he would, and we paid him, but later we discovered he hadn’t! He just took the money and ran, it seems. Luckily for us, Paulino had managed to organize a porter party to meet him at the bridge and carry the food he was supposed to deliver by truck past the trench and up to the village. They came marching down the hill to find us sitting there waiting for rescue, and there were enough of them to gather around the little truck and lift first the front end and then the back into a position where Eden could reverse it down back onto the bridge.
Several times this evening, when the embarrassing story has had to be retold, Deborah has hissed at me, “Aventura!”…
In the evening we sat waiting for two people from the “drinking water committee”. Paulino had said they were coming to answer questions about the collection of fees for Pam. They were required to show us their books to be photographed. Apparently Pam has asked to see the books before and the answer was always “tomorrow”, at which point Jean suggests they probably begin running around trying to collect the fees to improve the look of the books before they show them to Pam, who actually never gets to see them. Of course, we waited in vain…these two people did not show up at all. Eden’s suggestion is that they be told to bring the books to Deb and I so that we can photograph the pages and email them to Pam – that way they can’t (but I betcha they can!) use the excuse that the books will be made available “tomorrow”, since we’ll likely be here for three more weeks.
There is supposed to be another group of women arriving tomorrow morning to be interviewed, for which Eden has now extended his time in Malingua…we’ll see how that works out. He was supposed to have a meeting with a local mayor, but that hadn't been set up. Jean is thinking she should have made a prior trip herself to do all the arranging herself that Paulino was supposed to have done, and that the requests be made earlier to give him more time to accomplish the set-up. I'm not not sure whether that might have made a difference. As Eden said, he doesn’t know where the middle ground is between not giving him enough time, and giving him so much that he has time to forget what he is supposed to do.
Paulino is an awfully busy guy, and Eden has wondered if he shouldn’t be taking on a “vice-president” or an apprentice that he can mentor, to be able to spread himself out as far as he needs to at times like this. His whole family seems quite enterprising and forward thinking, but that doesn’t jive with how he responded to the challenge before him this weekend. I couldn’t help wondering if he really understood how important it was to have these meetings set up, and if he appreciated in the slightest the cost and effort that Eden made to come here and try to help the villagers in the area break the cycle of poverty. As their population expands, without irrigation and more sustainable permaculture practices, they won’t be able to support their growing families using the subsistence farming they have employed up until now; and there are other issues to be addressed, like nutrition and sanitation, and basic medical care.
Road engineering and erosion control is a necessary focus: locals cut away the soft hillsides to create roads, to get buses and trucks to the villages, but wash-outs happen frequently, sometimes partially caused by free-range sheep chewing the vegetation off the steepest hillsides and destroying the root structure that holds the top layer of soil together. The EWB taught the communities to buttress the weak areas with stone (there are granite stones that wash out of the hills in places), and they have undertaken this repair process in similar places on their own, which Jean was pleased to see.
By Sunday night I went to bed thinking that trying to get them to work with you to set the stage for an optimistic future seems to be sometimes like the old saying that “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” Or at least, that uptake is a very slow, gradual process.
On Monday, I learned that my weekend impressions only applied to the weekend. There were no women for the promised seven a.m. meeting, so after breakfast Aurora begged Eden to drive her to the Monday market at Guantualo, and he invited us along to see the market and the scenery between here and there. Deb helped her set up while I wandered to get photos in a hurry before we headed back. Great spot for visuals, but the sound of yearling pigs in the livestock market was nothing less than mass hysteria!
We got back to Malingua at 9:30 a.m. and walked into an assemblage of community leaders and women numbering twenty already, and that number continued to grow over the hours of a very long meeting until it had doubled. The mayor of the canton showed up with his personal assistant and a radio journalist complete with digital recorder, and did some politicking. Topics included the next phase of development of the irrigation project, which involves major accounting and projections for materials on paper by the different community groups; more courses for women, composting, revisiting the design and use of the gov’t built toilet in the school, greenhouse training and materials, seeds from Jean for the women, and the crappy internet service to the valley.
The mayor got really excited when Eden described his system in Colorado, a completely wireless line-of-site radio internet system with very high bandwidth that serves 600 local clients including schools and businesses for a total start-up cost of around $3500, and that could serve 2000 with an additional $1000 investment. That’s a pretty small capital investment, and he lives (and travels to Ecuador on his own dime) on the revenue his business generates. High bandwidth is the major cost, not the radio relays; but the bandwidth costs are passed through to the users, so it’s a non-issue for him. He’s convinced that there would be enough business use and internet cafés here to generate sufficient income to pay for high bandwidth for everybody else, if the mayor invested in the installation…which the mayor seems extremely excited to do.
After the mayor had been served lunch and left, Eden and Jean, Deb and I had our lunch. I passed off what I thought was a deep fried chicken foot onto Deb's plate, but it turned out to be the upper dentures of a hapless cuy (guinea pig), needle-like incisors protruding. By the time Deb realized what she was eating, she already liked the taste, so she gouged out its cheeks and continued chewing happily. Now she has had cuy, and so has Eden - for his first time in five years of coming here. I had to settle for deep fried chicken, which looked almost the same, but wasn't.
Eden and Jean left late in the day, a day after they had intended to have returned to Latacunga, to try to make it back in time for their Rotary dinner there. Eden was finally satisfied that he’d accomplished something significant, and hadn’t come all this way for nothing. I was impressed with the ability of the community to hold long meetings, although still dubious that words would lead to actions on the part of the mayor or the local water groups.
The next day the internet was back up by late in the day. I spent the day typing Deb’s transcript of our meetings. I helped Deb set up an accounts ledger to teach some bookkeeping skills to the two guys who collect fees and record expenses for the potable water system and the irrigation water system – they haven't recorded those expenses now, they just keep a loose and messy stack of invoices. As a result, they don’t know how to make projections to propose fee increases to the community users of the water system. They haven’t been diligent at collecting fees or cutting people off for non-payment, which means they only collected about 75% full payment for each of the past three years; people who didn’t pay were still allowed to stay on the system, but they’ve gone through periods of low water availability, and now they have a leaky tank and not enough money on hand to repair it. The two guys didn't show up for their training.
Of those 25% who haven’t paid, 10% are not living here and using the water, even though their land holdings are here; they’ll have to decide what to do about that. Of the remaining 15%, there are a few genuine hardship cases, including a mother with four kids who spoke to us tonight. She was one of the bright sparks in the early set of training for women that Pam and Eden were involved in, but her husband died in a tragic construction accident. She can’t get a decent well-paying job; she needs to buy books for school for her kids, especially for the eldest who is in a trade school – a serious investment for the family. She came rushing in to pay her delinquent water bill, but she was next to tears as she explained how broke she was. On the other hand, as Eden and Jean suggested, she might have money for other things, including attractive western clothing and participation in the weekend fiestas. I’m sure it’ll be heart-breakingly difficult for the water fee collector to know where to draw the line; he was already squirming in anticipation of having to make those kinds of decisions and firm actions, and he doesn’t seem tough enough to be a bill collector.
Anyway, tomorrow we’ll be writing a letter for this lady to Pam, sending our meeting transcript to Pam, Eden and Jean, teaching bookkeeping, and hopefully publishing this blog and a photo album, if the internet gods smile upon us tomorrow after a three day outage. Maybe I’ll even get to Skype my family. On Wednesday and Friday we’ll return to teaching our evolving Meet and Greet skit to classes in the school. On Thursday we’ll take our tour of the surrounding countryside and the volcanic lake Quilotoa. On Saturday we might connect once again with the college students and carry their Meet and Greet skit forward as well. That’ll mark the halfway point of our stay here.
Eden was dubious that English lessons would ever stick; it troubled him that he met a grown-up Pedro who knew less English now than he’d known on a previous visit. However, I remember my first words of French from Africa, some words of African languages, and a significant amount of German I learned “on the pillow” from an Austrian girlfriend thirty years ago, so I think it can stick and form a foundation to be built upon – I can still read and understand a lot of German text. These days, with the reach of the internet into the villages, Youtube videos and DVD’s, there’s a much better chance that the language will be reinforced between guest teachers. If the Spanish teachers used programmed instruction sites such as duolingo.com, they’d advance by leaps and bounds.
There’s still the debate about whether this is a value-added proposition, but the world is shrinking year by year, and we can’t pretend to predict or anticipate what the future benefits will be. Facility at English may allow some students the confidence to travel someday, to make trade connections, to serve in local tourism or gov’t tourism positions, to do translations, to read English equipment manuals, to host non-Spanish speaking visitors and volunteers to their community and make them feel welcome, and even – as this school site grows into a genuine pueblo, as it clearly is with all the public buildings under construction making it an education centre – generate revenue in the Hostal Sacatoro, with young Bolivar, Roberto or Hugo speaking English to guests who can be coaxed to detour slightly from the usual Latacunga/Isinlivi/Quilotoa routine.
I’m hoping that by the time we leave here we’ll have a fun farewell slideshow for the school community using the InFocus projector, as well as some relatively polished public performances of the Meet and Greet skit...and no more "aventuras", unless they are of the most positive sort!
Another link to the photo album, in case you missed it in the text.
Next: Quilotoa
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